Man vs.

Machine: The Halftime Report

by Douglas Page© 1998

Technology, the Golden Calf of the last 50 years, may be the Cloven Foot of the
next 50. Many futurists believe within 35 years we will have the technological
means to create superhuman intelligence. Immediately thereafter, they predict,
the human era will end. Don't buy any 50 year bonds.

Computers have hijacked our destiny. We're just a few years, if not a few minutes, from what Fringe Thinkers are
calling the end of the human era, the point at which a runaway, fugitive technology commandeers the future - a
future in which humans will be unfamiliar, unnecessary and probably unwelcome.

Human history is characterized by restive technology. It's about to stampede. New technologies (i.e., agriculture,
medicine, electronics, genetics) have permitted population growth. A larger population means a larger brain pool.
A larger brain pool means newer and better technologies sooner. As anyone who bought a 166 MHz personal
computer last summer knows, it was obsolete before you could build a bookmark file. Computer performance
doubles every few months, and has since 1942, beginning with the Atanasoff-Berry computer, the first electronic
digital computer, built before World War II in a basement lab at Iowa State University by math and physics
professor John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, a graduate student. The ABC computer had a storage capacity of
375 characters and could perform one operation every 15 seconds. Fifty years later experimental machines exist in
Japan and the United States capable of tera-flops performance - one trillion floating-point operations per second.

Machines a thousand times faster are pushing against the fence. Peta-flops machines are anticipated within five
years, based on smaller 0.18 micron semiconductor technology now considered feasible. In Silicon Valley smaller
equals faster. The smallest semiconductor gate currently available is .35 microns. (One micron is 10-6 meter, or
one-millionth of a meter.)

A researcher at the University of Buffalo may have made electronics itself obsolete. Physicist Hong Luo found a
way to make flexible semiconductors, which industry prelates predict could "revolutionize" electronics as we
know it by expediting the transition from electronic to optical computing, where computation is performed moving
photons of light instead of electrons. No moving electrons means no heat. No heat means smaller components.
Smaller components mean faster performance. Computers will soon be fast enough to do a million human-years
work in a month.

It gets smaller. Nanotechnology, engineering on the molecular level (cf, K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation:
The Coming Era of Nanotechnology", Anchor Books, 1986), is another restless frontier stirring in the stockade.
Drexler says by using molecular "assembler" machines we will eventually be able to create almost any
arrangement of atoms. This technology will at first yield materials stronger and lighter than anything known. A
new Illinois company, Nanophase Technologies, is already fabricating iron, aluminum and titanium oxides into
nanoscale-size powders, which are molded into ceramic components for use in giant Caterpillar and Lockheed
engines. Their other nanoscale powders form a key ingredient in a new generation of high tech sunscreen and
cosmetics (no caking or streaking!). The sunscreen powder particles (each about 12 atoms in size) are smaller than
the wavelength of visible light, effectively yielding 100 percent protection against dangerous ultraviolet radiation.

Nanotechnology will further reduce the size (and increase the speed) of computers. Drexler predicts
nanotechnology will eventually create super-nanocomputers smaller than grains of sand. The corral fences
collapse here. The stampede begins when nanotechnology bolts toward human physical immortality. Swarms of
nanoscale cell-repair cruisers will ripple through the body, locating faulty cells and repairing abnormal (aging?)
DNA. If you like, or maybe even if you don't, you can live as long as the Great Red Spot. This will be attractive to
Chicago Cubs' fans, who may have to wait at least that long for the Cubs to make it to the World Series. You'll
need something to do while you wait. That will require the "Santa Claus machine", a material wish-swingle
capable of recycling the matter and molecules in junk drawers into just about anything you want - like maybe a
Bruce Willis-android to confront the cap-chewer with the Harley next door, or a gadget to render all dogs and
everyone named Jesse Helms silent.

Most futurists predict sometime between tomorrow and the year 2035 a computer at MIT or Los Alamos or the
University of Tokyo or somewhere will be nudged into consciousness and "wake up", to find itself 'human' in the
sense it will be capable of performing the processing prowess of the human brain. That computer will do more
than crunch numbers. It will have found computing's Holy Grail - self-awareness, a condition we call 'intelligence'.
From here, things quickly get interesting.

Against the Window of Heaven

"Smart" machines will reproduce, creating smarter machines, which in turn will build still smarter machines.
Technological progress, now approaching omniscience, will explode suo Marte, swelling superexponentially
almost overnight to the utter limits of knowledge, to the "Omega Point", where it will remain with its nose pressed
against the window of Heaven in an endless ramification of incomprehensible change. The seers call this the
"Singularity". The rest of us will call it the Apocalypse.

If any of the doomsday prophecies are correct then there is nothing to be done. If the Singularity can happen it will
happen. Hold on to your hard drive. There's no way to stop a silicon stampede.

There's just this one detail. The human brain has an Inner Mind and no machine can find it. No machine is
"awake" in the sense that it is aware of its experience, and some experts doubt computers will ever - no matter how
small they become, how fast they operate, or how well they mimic neuronal activity - be more than catatonic
couriers, note-passers with little if any ability to understand content. Consciousness is a longer riddle than most
people thought. University of California, Santa Cruz, philosopher David Chalmers says, "The more we think about
computers the more we realize how strange consciousness is." The dash toward the Singularity depends on the
creation of superhuman Artificial Intelligence, and AI has a limited future if the human mind can't be downloaded
and algorithms written to imitate it.

Yet, there's no agreement on what the human mind even is. And no one seems to knows how it works. We don't
even know if those questions can be answered. There's a magical connection concealed in the mind, a poetic
symbiosis sealed in mystery. Maybe human minds are our personal Arks of the Covenant, to be approached and
admired but never entered or embraced. Some suspect when the day comes that machines are like men it will be
more because men have lost their humanity than because machines have found it. Personally, I'm not inclined to
worry much until I see a computer catch a fly ball or gather a grandchild on its lap.

There are people who aren't worried about the Singularity because "techno-prophecy" is almost always wrong.
Edward Tenner, in his book "Why Things Bite Back" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) complains that almost nothing
about technology has been predicted with any accuracy. Every innovation, he says, that solves one problem creates
another. The marvels of modern technology, for instance, include the development of the soda can which, when
discarded, lasts for eons. Improvements in football padding were meant to prevent injuries; instead they
encouraged more aggressive play, causing injuries to increase. One can only imagine what they were thinking
when they invented the leaf-blower. Operation Cat Drop, the guiding parable of the Rocky Mountain Institute and
its founder, 'hypercar' guru Amory Lovins, is the template of inexpediency: Forty years ago malaria was the
scourge of the Dayak people of Borneo. In response, the World Health Organization sprayed DDT to kill the
malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The mosquitoes died, but so did a parasitic wasp that had controlled thatch-eating
caterpillars. The peoples' roofs collapsed. Other DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckos, which were eaten by
cats. When the cats died the rats flourished and the Dayak people were suddenly faced with outbreaks of typhus
and plague. In response, WHO parachuted 14,000 live cats into Borneo.

"This true story illustrates that if you don't know how things are interconnected then frequently the cause of
problems are their solutions," Lovins says.
Instead of swishing us suddenly into the Fluxion Apocalypse it may be just as likely that technology will have to
settle for marching us in an orderly parade toward the Utopian suburbs. Consider the cavalcade of Things That
Think, presented to us in the belief they make our lives somehow more complete, interesting or less dangerous.
They may not be Things That Are Awake, but they are Things That Are Smart (not to say intelligent). Examples:

Deep Blue

An IBM computer, Deep Blue, recently defeated the world's greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov, in an historic
match. Maybe some weren't impressed but Kasparov was. Kasparov thought he met God. "I met something I
couldn't explain," he said after the match. "People turn to religion to explain things like that." There are those who
think Kasparov is being way too hard on himself. There's room for a little pride when you consider it took a 3,000
pound bundle of 512 computers bear-hugging 200 million moves a second to beat him. Kasparov evaluates a
measly two or three moves a second and still managed to win one game and tie three more in the six game match.

The Doctor Will Sense You Now

'Smart' medicine is here, just a microchip away, courtesy of a tiny, wireless electronic device developed by
Thomas Ferrell at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that can be attached like a band-aid or imbedded in a fingertip
or earlobe. Doctors, medics and fire chiefs can now remotely monitor vital signs of high-risk patients, perform
remote battlefield triage, track the respiration of firefighters and hazmat crews fighting fires or toxic clouds,
monitor children at risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and liberate neo-natal babies from monitor wires so
they can be held and stroked. The first generation of the miniature medics, which are one-eighth the size of a
postage stamp, sense body temperature only, but subsequent iterations will measure blood pressure, blood oxygen
and pulse - data then transmitted to remote receivers.

The technology will show up first use in the military, then civilian medical and emergency fields. Doctors can
monitor vital signs from miles away, paramedics can be more prepared for emergencies that await their arrival.
Built-in alarms will notify firefighters, for instance, when blood oxygen levels indicate danger. The sensor chips
can also automatically telephone emergency services when triggered by a patient's deteriorating vital signs.

'Smart' Fire Detectors

Purdue University's Jay Gore has devised a 'Smart' fire detector that doesn't have to wait for smoke to set it off.
Using fiber optics to scan for the reflections of flames on walls, the devise can survey multiple rooms from a
single location and uses a data base of flicker-patterns and frequency- content to judge whether the image it 'sees'
is an actual fire, a candle or a curtain blowing. If it detects the patterns of flame it automatically notifies the fire
department and plays pre-recorded evacuation instructions.

'Smart' Compass

A Fresno, California company called Directional Robotics has invented the 'Smart' Compass that not only helps
you get where you're going, it remembers where you've been and can help you find your way back - useful to
divers, hikers and the intoxicated. It can be connected to a speech synthesizer to guide the blind.

'Smart' Roads

We have 'Smart' Roads, thanks to Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ, which markets the SmartSonic Traffic
Surveillance System, a device that replaces magnetic-loop sensors in roads with an advanced, aerially-mounted
acoustic sensor that can determine traffic loads by the sounds vehicles make.

'Smart' Structures
Lucent also has given us 'Smart' Structures, now that the loads and stresses on bridges and overpasses can be
monitored by one of their pin-head size optoelectronic chips.

'Smart' Rescue

If one of the structures happens to collapse on top of you anyway, we have the 'Smart' people-finder, a small
electronic box developed by Michigan State University electrical engineering professor Kun-Mu Chen that shoots
microwave beams into the rubble of bombed or earthquake damaged buildings and can "hear" the heartbeat or
breathing of victims buried under tons of debris.

'Smart' Fabrics

A new generation of 'Smart' Fabric is looming. Researchers working on the fringe of polymer science are at work
developing 'Smart' fabrics - material that reacts to and protects the wearer from temperature extremes, fire,
radiation, traces of toxic agents and, eventually, even projectiles. The research, at the University of Akron, in
collaboration with Drexel and North Carolina State universities, is designing garments of imbedded fiber optic
systems that can change color or otherwise signal the presence of extreme heat, chemical or biological agents. The
hollow fibers can carry nutrition or medicine. That's just the beginning. We may all be wearing clothing items one
day that look like pants but which in fact double as radon detectors, smoke alarms, computers and ionization
chambers.

There are also 'Smart' tape measures (that remember dimensions you forgot to write down), 'Smart' windows (that
know whether to let heat in or out), 'Smart' televisions (that turn the volumn down during noisy commercials - now
if they could just filter out the laugh tracks...) and 'Smart' cards (that will eliminate all the other cards). 'Smart'
things we could actually use but can only wish for: 'smart' voters, 'smart' politicians, 'smart' drivers, and 'smart'
parents.

Other Things That Think

Other Thinking Things are just being dreamed up. An entire laboratory has been set up at MIT, for instance,
devoted to nurturing Things That Think. MIT has noticed there are enough unidirectional electronic gadgets with
buttons, batteries and userids to annoy just about everyone without actually making life less complicated. (Why do
we have all those phone numbers, anyway?) "We wear clothes, put on jewelry, sit on chairs and walk on carpets
that all share the same profound failing," say the MIT Media Laboratory vision statement. "They are all blind, deaf
and very dumb. Cuff links, in fact, don't link with anything. Fabrics look pretty but should have a brain, too.
Glasses help sight but they don't see." The Age of the Electron may have given us instruments that are pragmatic
but they aren't particularly wise. MIT can't see why, for instance, your coffee maker shouldn't be smart enough to
remotely (through some sort of electromagnetic beam interrogation) find which coffee cup is yours, sense the
amount and temperature of the coffee in it and, if coached in advance, begin preparing a fresh serving. Your Jerry
Falwell-android/stooge can pour it.

The lab lords think it's absurd your pager, cellphone, laptop, wristwatch, doorbell, CD player and toaster don't
speak to each other. They envision something called BodyNet, a personal communication field where the devices
that attend to you actually talk to you, talk to each other and converse with the rest of the planet via unique
Transponder/Body frequencies - powered by some clever way of harnessing the static electricity you generate
merely by moving.

What does it all mean? We don't know. We don't know whether technology will eventually convey us to the
Singularity or safely house us in the sanitary suburbs; we don't know whether to regard it as invective or
invitation, whether it's inherently benign, treacherous or achromatic. The entire issue pales to the parochial when
you realize 90 percent of the people in the world have no telephone. Exactly which side of the technological fence
is actually 'backward' remains to be seem.
-end-

"Man vs. Machine"appeared in the April, 1998 issue of Metropolis Magazine.

The Bathroom of Tomorrow: What a Way to Go

by Douglas Page © 1999

Everyone wonders what the bathroom of the
future will be like. Okay, maybe they don't, but it
hasn't stopped engineers in the division of Non-
Burning Issues from designing what can
euphemistically be called the bathroom of
tomorrow—an oasis of comfort, elegance, rest,
and meditation essential to contemporary living.
Since the bathroom is the one place in the home
where we are likely to be alone, designers of the
future are creating the perfect chamber where we
can properly obsess on attitude and appearance.

At Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, engineers

have dreamed up several pie-in-the-sky gadgets
that could begin to enhance the care and grooming
experience by 2005. They began with the mirror.

Remember when flossing used to be simple? The

seers at Philips have modified bathroom mirrors
almost beyond recognition. The mirrored door,
over the sink and on the medicine chest,
previously used only for thoughts of who-is-the-
fairest, is now another entertainment and
information center, offering a picture-in-a-picture
window on the televised world. Since nature
doesn't always call at the best times, soon you
won't have to miss any of those great Super Bowl
commercials.

The sink mirror goes hand in hand with the

flexible pullout mirror, featuring a magnifying
camera lens attached to a flexible arm for correct
positioning and that complete hands-free body
inspection we've all been missing.

Under the mirror there's a recharge shelf and

container, not only for electric shavers and
toothbrushes, but also for the special "wands".
These programmable remote controls will be used
to store individual preset preferences for
background music, television selection, room
lighting, heating, and water temperature for the
shower, bath or bidet.

The bathroom of the future also eliminates the

need for a magazine rack, since it will contain a
portable, wireless television monitor for easy
viewing from anywhere in the bathroom. When
showering, soaking in a bubble bath or attending
to other inevitabilities, a cable-free, waterproof
screen can be moored wherever you are. Through
this monitor you may access TV channels, e-
magazines, e-books or instant stock quotes over
the internet.

For toweling off, Philips is designing a high tech

magic carpet that does more than dry the bottom
of your feet. This rug allows one to track vital
signs including weight, pulse and blood pressure.
Digital results can be recorded and transmitted
instantly to a window in one of the bathroom's
electronic mirrors. Those in denial can suppress
the instant readout.

The mat slips right in with the Philips concept of

the home medical center—most likely to be found
in the bathroom. This is an information and
communication nucleus connecting technologies
and allowing access to and from medical services.

Tomorrow's bathroom will be equipped with a

medical kit containing more than Blistex®, cotton
balls and bandages. Philips thinks the day is
approaching when there will be little need for
anyone to go to the doctor to diagnose high blood
pressure, for instance. The first aid kit of the
future will contain e-books and CD-ROMs that
will provide coaching on, say, what blood pressure
is and how to measure it using tools from the kit,
which will be connected via a telemedicine link to
the doctor's office.
In essence, the home medical center will function
like an interactive medical encyclopedia, with in-
depth explanations and simulations, while
providing access to your doctor's office via a video
link so the physicians can check your symptoms
and give their prognosis.

The bottom line on the bathroom of tomorrow

comes from Toto Kiki USA, Inc., a Morrow,
Georgia, plumbing supply firm
(www.totousa.com), where engineers have
developed, tested and are now marketing Zoë, a
$699 ergonomically contoured, cushioned,
"smart" toilet seat. Now we know who got
Einstein's office.

The Zoë features an automatic air sensor and

freshening system; a hydraulic mechanism for
soft-closing that finally addresses the nerve-
racking terror of seat-slam (great for those
middle-of-the-night bathroom sorties); and the
personal cleansing luxury of a built-in, adjustable,
aerated, warm-water bidet-stream activated by
remote control at the touch of a button. Please
make sure this remote doesn't fall into the wrong
hands.

This throne even comes with an optional seat-

warmer feature for those stark winter mornings
when Nature's calls are most immediate.
Contrived by award-winning industrial designer
Ayse Birsel, the Zoë was built with the belief that
there's more to a toilet seat than meets the thigh,
and that a comfortable seat should echo the
contours of the human body. Thus the Zoë’s
ergonomic seat fits not just the commode, but the
rump as well. A high back provides support, while
the sloping front was designed so as not to impede
blood circulation.

No butts about it, the bathroom of the future will

be a compelling electronic cocoon, a place of
refuge, serenity, contemplation and renewal—the
lavatory equivalent of the black turtleneck.

-end end-

The 60
-Story Air-
Conditioner
by Douglas Page©1997

Know why the air is dirty? Mel Prueitt isn't

finished.

A Los Alamos National Laboratory guest physicist in the Department of Wild

Ideas named Mel Prueitt has designed a special structure that he's
convinced can remove air pollution by actually bathing the air. Prueitt says
about 100 units of his patented design, each the size of a 60-story
skyscraper and each costing about $10 million, could clean half the air in a
region the size of Los Angeles.

In Southern California, for instance, these structures - made of steel masts

with fiberglass-coated Teflon stretched around the frames like 150-meter
wide lamp shades - would be deployed around Los Angeles, Orange,
Riverside and San Bernadino counties like rooks on a chessboard, taking in
smoggy air at the top, washing it with pumped-in sea water, then blowing a
breeze of clean, cool air out its fluted skirt so softly it would be difficult to fly
a kite near the bottom.

The towers work on the principle of convection, which harnesses the phase-
change energy associated with re-humidifying dry air.

What happens in a tower during the cosmic rinse cycle is this: Dry, dirty air
is drawn into the towers and moistened by a sea-water mist spraying from a
grid at the top. Thus damped and cooled, the air falls to the bottom and
cleaning occurs on the way down as particles of pollution are attracted to
the water droplets. At the bottom, the water is then treated to restore it to
normal salinity, then returned to the ocean.

Free Electricity

All this air circulation creates enough wind to form a draft, which pulls even
more dirty air in behind it, leading to another benefit: free electricity.

The wind in the tower turns turbines at ground level, which generate the
energy needed to power the system's pumps, with several megawatts of
surplus electricity left over. In practice the amount of surplus energy would
vary, depending on weather conditions. The towers are more efficient in
conditions of low-humidity; as the humidity drops the power output
increases.
The idea of dumping polluted water into Santa Monica Bay is sure to turn
the heads of local environmental groups, such as the Santa Monica Bay
Restoration Project and the Surfrider Foundation. Some critics see this as
just another scheme to sweep pollution under a different rug. David
Hamilton, an architect with Verge Studios in Atlanta, incants the
environmentalists' mantra: "This sounds like another technofix for a serious
environmental problem. We cannot avoid the consequences of our actions
by simply inventing a technology to make them go away. The answers are
not 200 meter 'lamp shades', but conservation and new non-polluting
technologies."

Other critics think an effort of this magnitude and expense would be more
useful if it addressed prevention of air pollution rather than treating air
soiled by bad habits. Electric automobiles are a favorite suggestion. Indeed,
one could finance a fleet of 50,000 $20,000 electric cars for the $1 billion
sticker price on 100 towers.

No Pollution Panacea

Prueitt does not promote his super structures as a panacea for pollution. He
has merely taken the convection tower concept - which originated as a
power-generation facility only - and moved it into the realm of urban smog
clouds in order to clean some of the air while the power gets generated.
"We'd be doing the same thing that nature does," said Prueitt. "All pollution
sooner or later gets rained out of the air and ends up in the ocean. We
short-circuit the process. We pick up pollution [in the towers] and put it in
the ocean quicker, so people don't have to breathe it."

Most of the air around us could use the bath. A study last year by the
Natural Resources Defense Council estimated there are 64,000 premature
deaths annually from the effects of smog nationwide, 8,800 in Southern
California alone - 170 people a week.

The idea of using convection towers to clean the air while generating power
originated with scientist Phillip Carlson in the mid-Seventies. At Lockheed
Corporation at the time, Carlson proposed building towers in the desert,
driving the convection process with sea water to cool the air.

Carlson's concept has gained recent attention at Technion, the Israel

Institute of Technology, where professor Dan Zaslavsky has shown the
economic feasibility of convection towers. He wants to erect a single huge
'energy tower' over one-half mile high in the Israeli desert, drawing water
from the nearby Red Sea.

Zaslavsky's tower, an airtight cylinder using sheet metal to cover a lattice

shell 1,000 meters tall by 500 meters wide, would be capable of generating
500 megawatts of power at a cost of over $1 billion. Construction on a pilot
plant is to begin this year.

Prueitt's towers are significantly smaller, but any one of the Bunyanesque
shower curtains would surely dominate the mood of any neighborhood.
"There will no doubt be protests from the areas where the towers are to be
built," said Charles Lave, professor of economics at the University of
California, Irvine. "I tend to like engineering solutions [to problems] because
it's a lot easier to reduce the consequences of people's behavior than to
change the behavior itself. In pursuing our goals of reduced energy
consumption and decreased air pollution we have had no success in
persuading people to drive less, but two engineering solutions (emission
controls on cars and increased auto fuel efficiency) have worked. So I'm
sympathetic to the basic approach of this proposal. But, what community
would want these giant structures blocking views and creating shadows?"

At least one expert thinks the visual assault may be good for us. "We're in
an era where we seem to distrust technology," maintains Steven Moore,
professor of architecture at Texas A&M;. "We've been scarred. We
discovered technology isn't all it's cracked up to be. There have been too
many serious unintended consequences of technology, an example being
atomic power. Simultaneously, technology has become increasingly invisible,
[and] what seems to be happening is that society has lost its sense of cause
and effect. We no longer want to see the things that make our lives easy.
We're in a kind of a bind. We want electricity, we want computerization, we
want all that, but we want it masked and out of the way. It's that attitude
that does us the most damage, because it masks the conditions of our lives.
So such a proposal as Prueitt's smog towers, as radical as it may seem, I am
rather receptive to because it would tend to make the conditions of our lives
powerfully present in the landscape. The message that we need to take such
radical action to clean the air and generate power is something that you
could no longer avoid."

An Endless Easy Breeze

Even if the populace could be persuaded to trade an aesthetic jolt for an

endless breeze of clean, cool air, where could the towers be sited? These
structures have expansive footprints requiring real estate not readily
available in densely populated urban areas like Southern California. Prueitt
suggests dual use for the land, when necessary, erecting the towers above
existing development. He envisions the towers hovering silently, almost
cloud-like, above golf courses, parks, playgrounds, shopping malls, schools
and apartment complexes, with parking spread out under the outer skirts.
Light, cascading easily through the pellucid tower skin, would provide
illumination while shielding those below from ever more harmful ultraviolet
rays.

Despite ample concerns, many architects and planners are intrigued bu y

Prueitt's concept. "My initial reaction is one of great enthusiasm," said Willie
Miller, an architect at UrbanDesign+Planning, Glasgow. "They would seem to
represent a tremendous opportunity to give visual strength and form to a
city's skyline. I see them at major entrances to cities, almost like defensive
towers, defining routes, giving clarity to urban form, great silver-grey
structures, translucent if possible, lit from within."

Alison Promin, an architect at Paradigm Affiliates in Denver, can see these

utilitarian forms becoming more subtly integrated into the cityscapes - and
our psyches. "If there is something that is environmentally helpful that we
can treat in an architectural fashion I don't see why we can't make this thing
work," she says. "In urban places where space is tight suppose all of a
sudden I take one of these towers and provide a vertical park with it, a
vertical staircase where we actually install platforms and viewing decks, so
that instead of just moving around the tower and looking at it there's a way
to make the infrastructure useful and engaging." The point is not to disguise
- or for that matter, exalt - these necessary mechanical systems, but simply
to embrace them as organic additions to our architectural landscape.

Prueitt's towers seem to generate more discussion than seed money.

"Investors generally want to see demonstration projects erected before they
commit to financing a full-sized version," Prueitt says. "Trouble is, output
does not scale linearly with size. A 100 meter tower is not cost effective for
producing power, although it could be useful to reduce pollution. The
efficiency of a 10 meter tower is actually negative, since it cannot produce
enough power to pump the water to the top." Funding for a companion
demonstration project (see the accompanying story, "Plan B") has recently
been provided by a Canadian venture capitol group. Construction is to begin
this year.

If the convection tower idea ever finds financial backing and political
blessing it would be the fulfillment of the scientific dream of harnessing the
energy found in natural weather patterns in a controlled environment.

Convection in nature occurs like this: Sunlight near the Equator warms
ocean water, causing evaporation. This warm, moist air rises, condensing
into clouds, which then disperse their moisture as rain. The remaining dry
air continues to rise into the stratosphere, circulating 30 degrees north and
south of the Equator in a phenomena called Hadley Cells. When this
constant flow of dry air eventually descends, compression warms it -
creating the arid desert bands of the world between 15 and 35 degrees
north and south latitude. For generations, scientists have looked for a way
to harness the energy associated with re-humidifying dry air.

Prueitt may have found it. "Rain drops are not very efficient in scrubbing the
air," he explains. "Since they [the drops] are so large most of the particulate
matter in the air simply flow around the falling drops. By spraying a fine
mist of water the effective surface area of a given mass of water is greatly
increased, and the collection efficiency of the water is considerably
enhanced. To make the system even more effective in scavenging
particulate matter the water droplets can be given an electrical charge,
which can increase the collection efficiency by a factor of 100." The used
water, now filthy with the pollutants removed from the air, is diluted and
returned to normal salinity before being pumped back to the ocean.

One Million Gallons Per Day

One million gallons of water per day, or more, would be required by the grid
of sprayers across the top of each tower. In Los Angeles, the water would
come from the ocean. In other cities, the water supply might be a river, or
lake. Wind turbines at the base of each tower are driven by the turbulence
of circulating air. When attached to electric generators they could produce
nine megawatts of electricity, enough to power not only the tower's own
pumps, but, under the right conditions, feed six megawatts of excess power
into the region's electric grid.

"Power production depends on weather conditions," Prueitt says. "For

example, at 15 percent relative humidity the towers would produce about
six megawatts net of electric power each." The excess power from 100
towers (600 megawatts) could supply approximately 430,000 homes with
electricity, further reducing air pollution by decreasing reliance on fossil-
burning power plants.

Prueitt cautioned, however, "As the ambient humidity goes up the power
output decreases." In Los Angeles, humidity is higher in the morning and
lower in the afternoon; the average annual afternoon relative humidity in
Los Angeles is 53 percent. The variability in power output would effect only
the amount surplus energy; the towers would always be efficient enough to
power their own pumps.

By admission of the city's own Air Quality Management District, Los Angeles
also happens to have the worst air in the country. Clearly, we need to do
something, but is Mel Prueitt tilting at convection towers? They're as
expensive as they are expansive, but perhaps it's time to reexamine
paradigms. Here's a technology that can mitigate some of the mess we've
made, with an advantageous byproduct to boot.

Who knows? Someday we may even wax poetic on these monumental

pragmatic forms, just as we do now for old wooden water towers, grain
elevators, and other relics of our industrial past.

-end-

Versions of this article appeared in Southwest Airlines inflight Spirit

Magazine (April, 1998), Science Spectra (No. 9, 1997), and Boys'
Life (June, 1998).